Research shows benefits of Montessori education – Published in the Education Guardian, Friday 29th, September 2006 A method of schooling that focuses on personal development rather than exams produces more mature, creative and socially adept children, scientists have found. Psychologists in the US found that across a range of abilities, children at Montessori schools out-performed those given a traditional education. Five-year-old Montessori pupils were better prepared for reading and maths, and 12-year-olds wrote “significantly more creative” essays using more sophisticated sentence structures. Some of the biggest differences were seen in social skills and behaviour. Montessori children displayed a greater sense of “justice and fairness”, interacted in an “emotionally positive” way, and were less likely to engage in “rough play” during break times. The schooling system was invented in the early 1900s by Maria Montessori to educate poor children in...

Montessori Education Provides Better Outcomes than Traditional Methods, Study Indicates The study appears in the Sept.29th, 2006 issue of the journal Science. A study comparing outcomes of children at a public inner-city Montessori school with children who attended traditional schools indicates that Montessori education leads to children with better social and academic skills. The study appears in the Sept. 29, 2006 issue of the journal Science. Montessori education is characterized by multi-age classrooms, a special set of educational materials, student-chosen work in long time blocks, a collaborative environment with student mentors, absence of grades and tests, and individual and small group instruction in academic and social skills. More than 5,000 schools in the United States, including 300 public schools, use the Montessori method. The Montessori school studied is located in Milwaukee and serves urban minority children. Students at the...

Montessori Builds Innovators – The full article is found: on the Harvard Business Review website. There are strident disagreements these days over every aspect of American educational policy, except for one. Everyone thinks it would be great if we could better teach students how to innovate. So shouldn’t we be paying a great deal of attention to the educational method that produced, among others, Larry Page, Sergei Brin, Jeff Bezos, Jimmy Wales, Peter Drucker, Julia Child, David Blaine, and Sean “P. Diddy” Combs? They were all students in Montessori schools. According to a Wall Street Journal article by Peter Sims, there’s a “Montessori Mafia” among the creative elite. So maybe there’s something to the method Italian physician Maria Montessori came up with around the turn of the 20th century. The cornerstones of this method, according to Wales’s brainchild Wikipedia,...

RAISING A WORLD CITIZEN As our children grow up and become part of the world’s workforce, understanding those other cultures — and other languages — will be even more critical. If you speak more than one language (or studied another in school) and/or have traveled abroad, you may already appreciate the increased world and cultural understanding that comes with learning a language, and want that for your child, too. Before your child is even ready for school, you can take steps to introduce one — or more — languages to your child. Too soon? How soon is too soon to introduce a second language to your child? Many would say never! More than a few kids grow up in multi-lingual homes — hearing, learning and speaking two or more languages during formative language acquisition years. The result is multi-lingual...